Duke Feminist Workshop Attendee Reflections

Each year, GSWS/FQT sends a group of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to the Feminist Theory Workshop (FTW) hosted by the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. FTW promotes dialogue among scholars of feminist theory, bringing together internationally recognized keynote speakers and emerging young scholars to engage in lively and focused debate. For the next few weeks, we will publish reflections from GSWS’s 2026 FTW workshop participants, which will later be archived on the GSWS/FQT website. Questions about the program can be directed to Gwendolyn Beetham: gbeetham@sas.upenn.edu 

Ola Kalu – a Community Violence Prevention Postdoctoral Fellow who holds a joint appointment as a Postdoctoral Fellow through Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) in Pediatrics (Emergency Medicine) as well as a SPAR Fellow (The Supporting Promising Academic Researchers (SPAR) fellowship with the University of Pennsylvania's Provost Fellowship. 

"For me, the Duke Feminist Theory Workshop was so rewarding. Postdocs are siloed. There is no cohort, no community. You arrive at an institution mid-career, mid-project, and often mid-crisis just trying to produce work that matters while navigating spaces that were never quite designed with you in mind. And especially because I have a heavy humanities and social science background, I needed to be around people who reminded me of the theoretical components of the work I do and how systems extract emotional and affective labor from Black women while simultaneously devaluing their experience. Hearing faculty like Drs. Erica Edwards and Anne Cheng contextualize these questions with such intellectual precision and generosity was not just affirming. It was clarifying in ways I had not anticipated. 

Dr. Edwards's scholarship helped me see what care labor looks like differently in regards to reproductive justice. In community health work they are building care infrastructures the state has refused to provide, with an expertise medicine consistently refuses to recognize. Her work gave me language for something I had been feeling but struggling to name. Dr. Cheng pushed me in a different direction, enlightening how bodies can be visible enough to be surveilled but not visible enough to be heard much of a tension between being legible as a research object and being recognized as a knowing subject that sits at the center of my own work every day. 

What I take home from Duke Feminist Workshop is a set of better questions and a sense of community I did not expect to find. I want to especially acknowledge Marc, whose conversations with me about social positioning, the way race, gender, and sexuality locate us differently within academic, personal, and political spaces were among the best exchanges I had all weekend. Those conversations reminded me that the questions are never purely abstract. They live in how we move through rooms, whose labor gets recognized, and whose expertise gets questioned before it is ever heard. 

None of this would have been possible without the support of the GSWS/FQT program, and I am deeply grateful for the funding and the vision behind it."

Rosie Poku - PhD Candidate, Africana Studies and Comparative Literature 

“Won’t You Celebrate With Me”: Feminist Gathering in the Contemporary Moment 

As a Black feminist thinker, scholar, and educator, the most recent federal attacks on gender studies and Black studies feel simultaneously familiar and painful. While the Academy was never built to support either field, nor has it ever readily adopted either discipline beyond neoliberal incorporation, it is still painful to see and experience the renewed energy put forward to target and defund Black feminist thought. 

In this moment of reinvigorated antagonism, it is particularly meaningful, then, to be able to gather amongst those who advocate feminism and believe in the intellectual projects of Black feminist inquiry in particular. Duke’s 19th Feminist Theory Workshop, led by Black feminist scholar Dr. Jennifer Nash, felt like a moment of celebration in a way (and it is with immense gratitude to Penn’s GSWS/FQT program that I was able to attend). Though each scholar who spoke at the workshop articulated the contemporary states of emergencies in which contemporary feminists live, the ability to gather, converse, and theorize as feminist thinkers was not lost on me. I am reminded of Lucille Clifton’s poem “won’t you celebrate with me,” which reads as follows: 

won’t you celebrate with me 

what I have shaped into 

a kind of life? i had no model. 

born in babylon 

both nonwhite and woman 

what did i see to be except myself? 

i made it up 

here on this bridge between 

starshine and clay 

my one hand holding tight 

my other hand; come celebrate 

with me that everyday 

something has tried to kill me 

and has failed. 

The final lines of Clifton’s poem resonate with me most: “come celebrate/ with me that everyday/ something has tried to kill me/ and has failed.” Feminist gathering at the workshop this year felt like a celebration in this way. 

This semester, I am teaching a GSWS course, cross-listed with Africana Studies, called Journeys in Black Feminism. This past week, we read from Jennifer Nash’s Black Feminism Reimagined: 

After Intersectionality (2019), and it was exciting to teach her scholarship after hearing her speak at the workshop. I was able to tell my students about the impacts of her current Black feminist work at Duke and beyond. In Black Feminism Reimagined, Nash writes the following: 

While black feminists have long traced the violence of the university, few have advocated for abandoning the institutional project of black feminism, despite longstanding and widely circulating texts theorizing how the academy quite literally cannibalizes black women, extracts their labor, and renders invisible the work they perform to establish fields (5). 

Black feminism has always had a complicated (at best) relationship with the Academy, and though the university as an institution will likely never wholly value Black feminist theorizing and labor, I agree with many Black feminist theorists that the institutionalized project of Black feminism is still not worth abandoning. Black feminism belongs in university classrooms and in scholarship, as do Black feminist thinkers themselves. 

In my most recent class, however, many of my students, rather understandably, posed questions of despair. This is not unusual in our contemporary moment where what we learn in the classroom often feels dissonant to global events and conversations. They asked: Can we ever achieve ‘progress’ in the university? Will Black feminist forms of knowledge ever really be incorporated into curricula? What does it mean that we are learning about Black feminism, freedom, and liberation in the classroom, but Black people outside of our university are actively being displaced and disenfranchised? Does our Black feminist work in the classroom even matter? I understood and empathized with their questions completely; they were all questions I have asked myself at some point. But how might I go about answering them in ways that did not leave my students in despair? 

One student rose her hand to speak, and she began answering those seemingly impossible questions. She reminded us of the importance of our work. She reminded us that there are smaller steps toward ‘progress’ that we can take and are taking, both in our classroom and beyond. She reminded us that our classroom and our Black feminist theorizing, conversations, and learning do matter and are not meaningless. I am so often impressed by and grateful for the brilliance of my students. 

The students in my classroom, like the speakers and attendees at the Duke Feminist Theory Workshop, are not impervious to feelings of overwhelm and despair; we have been impacted, structurally and affectively, by renewed and ongoing violence, attacks, and defunding. Nonetheless, our gathering remains valuable and meaningful. Institutional relationships to feminism can and will shift, but feminist advocacy, theorizing, and collaboration has and will always remain. 

It merits a reprise: “Come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed.”